Saturday, January 21, 2012

Potpourri.

Hello beautiful internet people!

So, it's been about a week and a half since my last post, and, to be honest, I haven't really been able to focus on anything lately. After a crazy weekend last weekend, and an even crazier night on Friday, it's high time that I start decompressing and getting my thoughts in order. In fact, my scatterbrained-ness has been showing in my composing. I've started about 6 new pieces of music, and I've written at least a page or two in all of them before finding no motivation to continue them or just throwing them away. This is kind of problematic, especially since I need to nail down what I'm doing for my semester project, keep working on my big band chart, finish a choral arrangement, write a trombone duet, and write about an hour of music for my filmscoring class this semester... Oh, and I still need to get last semester's project recorded. Yikes.

Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love being a composition major and a composer and wouldn't trade it for the world... But no matter how far ahead I work in any class or get in any composition, I'm technically forever behind. Seriously. As a perfectionist and a person who hates procrastinating, this is stressing me out big time. I know that the rest of my life is probably going to be like this, but still... It's a bit crazy. Seriously though, I would much rather have this craziness than be bored doing something else, so, I guess I can't really complain... Except I just did. Whoops. My bad.

Other than my attention span apparently deciding to take a 2-week (hopefully not longer) vacation, my life has been pretty great. Nebrasketball won a fantastic game against Indiana by 1 point, and I got to be the lucky kid playing synthesizer when it happened, which is pretty awesome. All of my classes are relevant to what my future plans are, and most of them are not only relevant but really really fun. I'm busy, but a good kind of busy, because I realize that if I completely sucked at composing, people would probably not be asking me to write them things. Meaning, I'm at least somewhat competent, which makes me a happy camper because I can only get better thanks to the awesome professors and extremely talented people I get to call my friends helping me out along the way.

I keep thinking back to the word that my professor, Dr. Lee, used when we were talking about how I ended up at UNL: Serendipity. Which, for those of you who don't know, means a happy accident. I used to think that I would hate staying in Nebraska, because at the end of my senior year of high school, I really hated this state and the small-town feel of everything. I now realize that having gone to Hillsdale, though still a great opportunity, would have probably just given me the same problems in a different geographic location. This is a nice balance before I have to go out into the real world and make a living, and I know that this is probably going to be the smallest town I end up living in for the rest of my life. So, I intend to make the most of it, and am actually more than happy that I'm here.

A song that I think sums this up, and that I've been listening to a lot lately: We Are Young by Fun. Featuring Janelle Monae. This song is really great to harmonize to (coughcough fellow music majors coughcough), and is just catchy and awesome and fresh and cool, so you should listen to it and be happy. I'm not personally a Glee fan, but I hear tell that they covered this song, which is cool, because I love seeing not-so-mainstream bands like this one getting exposure like that. I've yet to hear the Glee version, but here is the original. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv6dMFF_yts

Thank you to those of you who actually read these, hopefully I get around to writing again before the month is out. But, if I don't, know that I'm really busy and regret not keeping you updated, but that the next post will be more juicy than this one if that's the case.